On Blu-ray - David Hare is not happy with the Criterion edition of MIDNIGHT (Mitchell Leisen, USA, 1939)

 A few screens from Criterion's new Blu-ray of Mitchell Leisen's Midnight.

I won't comment at length but there's no doubt this should have been served up as a fully fledged 4K UHD disc. The Blu-ray runs with a healthy bitrate of ca.40 kbps which is usually enough to give a good theatrical 2k standard to a 35mm 1.37 B&W movie transfer with plenty of grain and detail. But this just doesn't. The image manages to display good nitrate shimmer and sparkle (of highlights and wardrobe designs) and the dynamic range (SDR of course) gives nice jet blacks and a good wide light exposure.

But there's just no fucking grain. I don't know how they've done this but if it wasn't actually de-grained at some level pre-mastering I suspect Criterion have gone into their now notorious filtering, a process which makes it "easier" to deliver a 2K encode without straining the grading process. They are now notorious for this.

As it stands this is very, very disappointing Blu-ray gets only part of the way towards replicating the 4K master which was itself derived from a long "hidden"/aka mislabelled deposit entry at Library of Congress as a dupe pos which in fact turned out to be a nitrate fine grain. Hence the gorgeous step across from the original to 4K scan is only one step off a nitrate O-neg.

I can only assume Criterion figures the sheer dollar return on this would not be enough to justify doing even a bare bones SDR 4K. I just hope the rights are not once again restricted so that someone else, and more reliable for quality mastering like Indicator in the UK can do this justice.